Page 12 of Fallen Starboy

Chapter

Eight

JUN

I had her pinned against the fridge, just inches away from our noses touching as I towered over her and tried to throw my weight around. She’d never been one for physical confrontation, so I leaned into that, wanting her to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

I didn’t want her to know how worried I was about them both when she wasn’t here when I arrived.

How much restraint it took me to not call her a thousand times, demanding her whereabouts.

I’d trusted her with Yejin; it was my own fault that I was so worked up.

But I refused to put the blame on myself.

Instead, I lashed out at the one person I felt deserved to feel bad here.

The woman who’d played mommy to a daughter she never wanted. A daughter she abandoned.

A daughter she had no rights to.

My daughter.

Her hand seared my skin beneath the fabric where she touched me, sending a thrill through me that resonated in every inch of my being. As if remembering how it felt to be inside her, my cock twitched insistently, throbbing as it stiffened behind the zipper of these too-tight pants.

I couldn’t let her find out she still affected me like this. I didn’t want her to affect me like this. I hated her, and I wanted her to feel that hate every second of the time she was forced to spend with me.

So why was I suddenly imagining how beautiful she’d look bent over the table as I railed her from behind?

My cock twitched again, and I closed my eyes momentarily, humming the Korean national anthem under my breath, anything to calm my racing heart, my boiling blood, to keep the filthy thoughts of her at bay.

Those thoughts would not be happening, not now, not ever. Not if I had anything to say about it.

Two fiery eyes lifted to meet mine in a battle of wills. “I’m not the na?ve girl I used to be, either, Jun,” she spat at me, her nose crinkling in distaste. “Now back the fuck up and let me go. Or do you treat all your assistants like this?”

I shoved away from the wall with a barely-contained growl. How dare she act like I was the unreasonable one? The audacity?—

“Don’t worry about Yejin anymore,” I snarled, crossing my arms as I gave her the cold shoulder. “Push up my interviews with the caretaker company to tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure you don’t need to be a stand-in babysitter anymore, since you’re so bad at it.”

“Bad at it?” The indelicate snort that left her was so unladylike, so familiar, so reminiscent of how she used to react when the guys in the group got on her nerves. “Hmph. As if you’d know. When was the last time you took time out of your busy idol schedule to spend a whole day with her?”

Those words cut like a knife between the shoulder blades. My blood ran cold. “You have a lot of nerve, saying that to me.”

The silence in the room was thicker than a dense fog at dawn in the fall.

It wrapped its chilled fingers around me and strangled the soul from my body.

The idea that I’d neglected Yejin in any way, even by accident, while I struggled every day to give her the kind of life she deserved, was heart-rending.

But I didn’t want to let her know she’d wounded me. If anyone should hurt, it should be the person who left. It should be her.

“At least I stayed. At least I tried. I didn’t leave her on a porch stoop, ring the doorbell, and run the fuck away like a coward.”

She didn’t say a word to me as she strode past me, her back ramrod straight as she marched up the stairs and shut her door behind her. All the pleasure I’d taken in hurting her like she’d hurt me fled my body as she disappeared from view.

Had I gone too far?

No. No, she knew what she was asking for, accepting this job. I wouldn’t hold back or play nice just to keep from hurting someone who’d hurt me so deeply. Who’d cut out my heart and served it back to me on a platter, the blade still stuck in the center of it.

She deserved every last cutting moment of pain that was a result of her own actions.

Fuck Arista. Fuck her feelings. She was a coward and a bitch, heartless and cold, and I’d do well to remember that.

Hours later, after I’d showered, made a quick meal, and responded to a few emails, I sat at the edge of Yejin’s bed with a book in hand, feeling like ten kinds of the worst dad in the history of ever as she told me about her day.

“After we had breakfast, Miss Arista took me to the zoo. I got to see all kinds of animals I’ve never seen before, Daddy.

There was a big blue parrot who made fun of some crying boy, but Miss Arista told me the bird didn’t understand right from wrong.

The boy’s mom took him away, gave him a balloon to make him feel better, and dried his tears.

” She paused for a minute, cocking her head to the side like she always did when she was trying to think of how to phrase something.

“Why don’t I have a mom, Daddy? Will I ever have one? ”

I closed the princess book in my hands and stared down at my lap, wishing I had thought about this answer sooner.

She’d asked me about her mother before, but I always just told her she was gone.

I never thought I’d have to explain beyond that.

Selfishly, I thought she’d drop it like she did whenever I answered one of her questions.

Of course, this would be the one thing she couldn’t let go.

“Your mom,” I started, the words dying in my throat. “Ahem.” I cleared my throat and tried again, hoping the words would magically make sense. That they’d just come out of me without even trying.

But I had nothing. Nothing that would satisfy my daughter, anyhow.

“You’re not the only girl who doesn’t have a mom, Yejin,” I said instead, hoping a different direction would help divert her attention. “Plenty of kids only have one parent. There’s lots of reasons, too.”

“My friend Yoo-ra back home doesn’t have a dad. He died in a car accident.” She frowned, staring down at her lap. “Did my mom die?”

Telling her that would be easy. It would give me an exit, an easy solution. But I couldn’t bear to see my daughter hurt like that. “She didn’t die, no,” I found myself muttering as my eyes trailed to the door. “She had some very important things to take care of, so she gave you to me.”

It was more generous than Arista deserved. It might’ve been better had I told her she was dead. Then there wouldn’t be more questions later, when the answer I gave wasn’t enough anymore.

“Will I ever meet her?”

Those were the words I’d dreaded from the second she learned to talk.

“I don’t know,” I told her, wondering if I’d have the heart to tell her the truth even when she was old enough to have kids of her own.

Wouldn’t keeping her in the dark be better overall for her mental well-being? “That’s not my decision to make.”

“Read me the story, Daddy,” she said suddenly, all the disappointment hidden behind her cheerful front. “I wanna hear about the princess who slays the dragon and saves her kingdom.”

So I read her the story. The words on the page began to blur as I reached the part about the princess finding out who her family was, and I glanced up to see if Yejin had noticed as my words wavered.

Her arms were wrapped tightly around a stuffed animal she’d had since the day she was brought to my doorstep. It’d been tucked neatly beside her tiny body in the carrier when I brought her inside and claimed her as my own.

It was also a stuffed animal I won for her mother on our first illicit, secret date.

The little ragged dinosaur had been her constant companion for seven years now, accompanying her everywhere she went, and not once in that time had she ever left its side.

When it needed to be put in the wash, she accompanied it, sitting alongside the machine until it was safely back in her hands.

When a neighbor dog snagged it and ripped a hole in its tail, she watched on as her beloved Uncle Minho stitched it up with his rudimentary sewing skills.

It was like a child to her, and she was utterly devoted to it.

It was also the one part of my past with her mother I couldn’t bear to take from her.

But she had no idea that the thing in her hand was a symbol of the love that created her.

A love that was now dead and buried.

Yejin was all that was left of that fleeting moment in our lives.

“Sleep well, little firefly,” I whispered, tucking the blanket up around her and her little dinosaur. I slipped her book back on the shelf and snuck out of the room, careful not to wake her as I slowly shut the door.

I turned around in the hallway, my eyes still watering from the sting of my choices, and stared at the door separating my past from my future.

Arista had been everything to me once upon a time. Everything. And now, all she was to me was an enemy, a thorn in my side that ached when you touched it, when you were reminded it existed only to cause you pain. I couldn’t stand the sight of her.

And yet . . .

And yet, something buried in the deepest recesses of my mind stirred at the sight of her.

At the mere mention of this woman, I was confused, aroused, and angry all at the same time.

When I heard her voice in my house, it was like waking up from a dream and finding out that what you thought was reality was all a lie.

It was disappointment and comfort, a simultaneous blow to the psyche that left me reeling, unsteady.

I wanted her gone.

But I also wanted her to stay.

I wanted to torment her like her memory and actions tormented me for years now.

But I also wanted to tie her to my bed and fuck her senseless.

I burned for her, hot and cold alike, simultaneously freezing in a hell of my own making and combusting in one of her creation.

Fate chose that moment to intervene, and I froze in place as the bathroom door opened and Arista herself slipped into the hallway wrapped in nothing but a pair of towels—one on her head, and one clinging precariously around her torso, barely covering her thighs from view.

All the blood rushed from my head and pooled . . . elsewhere.

Her eyes lifted from the floor, and she pinned me with a stunned gaze, her hand still on her head to dry her hair. “What are you doing here?”

My brain short-circuited as my mouth fell open like a fish gasping for air. “I live here,” I managed to recover spectacularly, hating the defensiveness in my words. “You got a problem with that?”

“Maybe keep your eyes to yourself,” she muttered, following my gaze as it instinctively trailed down her body. “Or do you ogle all your assistants like this?”

The tenuous threads I’d worked so hard to weave around myself, to keep me whole when I wanted to fall apart, snapped.

Closing the gap between my present and my past, I stepped forward, crowding her in against the wall of the hallway.

My arms became a cage as my palms slammed into the drywall, our faces mere inches apart as she instinctively cowered from the intensity in my stare.

“I’ve only ever looked at one woman like this.” I leaned in until I could feel her breath against my lips. Until my hair dusted her forehead, and I could count the lashes that fluttered against her cheeks. “And she ripped my heart from my chest, stomped on it, and returned it to me beyond repair.”